Slavery, Creolization, and the New Princes

Randy Sparks in The Two Princes of Calabar uses the story of two 'Creoles' from West Africa to weave together a picture of the Atlantic Slave Trade. I found this work helpful in my grappling with the realities of slavery. When exploring the complexities of slavery it can be easy to fall into traps that undermine conventional narratives. But undermining conventional slave trade stories is exactly what the experience of the Robin John's is meant to do. The Robin John's were very much apart of the new class of princes that supplied and were supplied by European ships conducting the slave trade when they fell victim to it. Sparks argues that they were knowledgeable of the Europeans and the nature of that trade in general; they used this to eventually secure there freedom and return home. This plays into the themes we've seen regarding African agency involving the slave trade, but also expands on it to include agency beyond African shores. This is something I found both interesting and perplexing. For one it opens up questions of how African concepts of slavery and status could reach the New World and highlights how not all slaves were equal. On page 85 Sparks quotes Ira Berlin who said, "if slavery meant abuse and degradation, the experience of Atlantic creoles provided strategies for limiting such maltreatment." The problem with this is that it highlights conditions that lead me to question the choice to highlight the agency of such persons because it undermines the power and importance  that Europeans had over the process. The Robin Johns were able to avoid plantation labor and return home because they could draw upon their knowledge and acculturation to make themselves useful to masters in the colonies. Do historians risk euphemizing slavery by drawing to many conclusions from the creole experience? Or is it important to do so in order to explore Atlantic slavery beyond conventional notions?